Wednesday, September 30, 2015

More on the Pope Francis/Kim Davis thing

[...] That this meeting happened is somewhat of a surprise: Davis has been one of the most polarizing figures in American politics in recent months, seen by some on the right as the foremost fighter against violations of religious liberty. When Pope Francis came to the U.S., his message was exactly the opposite—one of unity and reconciliation, not combativeness.

But it’s not surprising that the Vatican went about it this way. During his visit, the pope made a non-public stop to speak with victims of sexual abuse that the Vatican didn't announce until the last day of his trip, hoping not to distract from the pope’s larger message. This is how the Vatican often arranges controversial meetings: privately, and not to be shared until later

Yes, we're all too painfully aware of the Vatican's secrecy policy .... think sex abuse cover-up. You would think that the Vatican would have learned by now that deception is the enemy of trust.

Edward Snowden started his Twitter feed with a joke about surveillance, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers but following only one account: the N.S.A.’s. He tweeted back and forth with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, saying, “Thanks for the welcome. And now we’ve got water on Mars! Do you think they check passports at the border? Asking for a friend.”

an American dystopian alternate history television series produced by Amazon Studios. The series is based on the 1962 novel of the same name by American science fiction author Philip K. Dick. The story is an alternate history of the world in which the Axis powers won World War II. The United States has been partitioned into three parts: The Japanese puppet state of the Pacific States of America, which comprises the former United States west of the Rocky Mountains; a German puppet state that comprises the eastern half of the former United States; and a neutral zone that acts as a buffer between the two areas, called the Rocky Mountain States.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Kittens pooped on a hot afternoon

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Bill Nye: Stop Telling Women What to Do With Their Bodies

I saw a Big Think video from Bill Nye (the science guy) today. I only know who he is because he and Neil deGrasse Tyson were once on an episode of Stargate Atlantis - they appeared as past colleagues of the character of scientist Rodney McKay :) .....

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Pope Francis at St. Patrick's tonight

Another danger comes when we become jealous of our free time, when we think that surrounding ourselves with worldly comforts will help us serve better. The problem with this reasoning is that it can blunt the power of God’s daily call to conversion, to encounter with him.

In his homily to clergy members, nuns and members of religious orders at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Pope Francis reminds them that they should live simply.

This is a common criticism of the church hierarchy in many American dioceses, including in New York, where Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan lives in a Madison Avenue mansion attached to the cathedral instead of in simpler quarters.

Pope's Congressional speech and scientists on his climate message

Reading Pope Francis' speech to Congress today. The parts that appealed to me were the mention of the Golden Rule, his request to abolish the death penalty, his hope that there will be a redistribution of wealth, his criticism of arms dealers, and his mention of his encyclical on the environment. Read more - Inside Pope Francis’ Address to Congress

As Pope Francis addresses a joint meeting of Congress today (Sept. 24), scientists are praising his encyclical on climate change — with a few caveats about population control.

A series of editorials published today in the journal Nature Climate Change applaud the pope's in-depth missive for his calls for collective action on warming temperatures, which are driven by fossil-fuel combustion. The encyclical was a "decisive democratic act," wrote Anabela Carvalho, a communication sciences professor at the University of Minho in Portugal. It was "passionate and compelling," added Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich and University of California, Berkeley environmental scientist John Harte in their co-authored editorial.

"Pope Francis needs to heed his own comments on the church's 'obsession' with contraception and abortion, and assume a leadership position in support of women’s rights and family planning," Ehrlich and Harte wrote ......

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Pope compliments US Bishops on handling of sex abuse

Pope Francis has hailed US bishops for their handling of the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Catholic church for decades, saying they had shown “courage” throughout and regained the authority and the trust which was demanded of them.

In rare remarks about the string of scandals that first emerged in the mid-1980s, Pope Francis stopped short of addressing the victims of clerical abuse, focusing instead on the pain that had been inflicted on the bishops who were left to weather the storm.

“I am also conscious of the courage with which you have faced difficult moments in the recent history of the church in this country without fear of self-criticism and at the cost of mortification and great sacrifice,” he said.

He then commended the bishops for being ready to sell off church property and assets in order to pay for settlements with abuse victims. “Nor have you been afraid to divest whatever is unessential in order to regain the authority and trust which is demanded of ministers of Christ and rightly expected by the faithful,” he said ....

The tarp man

Today and tomorrow the tarp man is here to put new tarps on the leaky roof before the rainy season starts. I did try to find some government grant or loan that would help pay for re-roofing the house, but I had no luck. At the moment, the tarp man is out buying the tarps, but he left some of his tools on the porch ....

The cats are all terrified of the stranger and his stuff so I moved their food to far away under the orange tree ...

First the tarp man must take the old tarps off and I guess there are lots of dead leaves and tree branches to get rid of too before the tarps are put on. Hope it doesn't last longer than two days!

Monday, September 21, 2015

The Pope and the Birth Control Ban

[...] The church establishment under Pope Francis continues to oppose access to birth control. The Holy See’s delegation at the United Nations has objected to the inclusion of contraception and reproductive rights in worldwide development goals. At every turn, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has fought the Affordable Care Act’s requirements for contraception coverage. In the Philippines, Catholic authorities strenuously opposed a bill to allow government health centers to stock free or subsidized birth control; the law finally passed in 2012. Catholic hospitals and clinics, the only option in some regions, often do not offer contraceptives.

Catholics around the world, meanwhile, largely support the use of birth control. A 2014 poll of 12,000 Catholics in 12 countries found that 78 percent supported contraception; in Spain, France, Colombia, Brazil and the pope’s native Argentina, more than 90 percent supported its use. In a 2008 survey, 71 percent of Catholics in the Philippines supported the country’s reproductive health bill.

Expanding birth control access worldwide would have huge benefits. Some 225 million women want to avoid pregnancy but don’t use reliable contraception, the Guttmacher Institute says. Providing them with contraception would prevent 52 million unintended pregnancies, 14 million unsafe abortions and 70,000 maternal deaths a year.

The Catholic Church has considered lifting its ban on contraception in the past. In 1964, Pope Paul VI convened a commission on the issue. A majority of members, including 60 of 64 theologians and nine of 15 cardinals, recommended repealing the ban. Instead, Pope Paul issued an encyclical confirming it would stay in place.

Pope Francis praised Pope Paul’s decision in his speech in Manila. But instead of looking to his predecessors, he should listen to Catholics today ......

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Warm afternoon

Saturday, September 19, 2015

The Pope, Bishop Gene Robinson, and Sister Simone Campbell

Francis X. Rocca writes that the Vatican has freaked out over some of the guests President Obama has chosen to greet the pope at the White House ...

On the eve of Pope Francis’s arrival in the U.S., the Vatican has taken offense at the Obama administration’s decision to invite to the pope’s welcome ceremony transgender activists, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an activist nun who leads a group criticized by the Vatican for its silence on abortion and euthanasia. According to a senior Vatican official, the Holy See worries that any photos of the pope with these guests at the White House welcoming ceremony next Wednesday could be interpreted as an endorsement of their activities .....

Or perhaps the Vatican's objections are unofficial? .....

But anyway ....

One person the Vatican is (or isn't) objecting to the pope meeting is Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of Network, a national Catholic social justice advocacy organization that helped pass a health care bill that the US Bishops opposed. She also led the Nins on the Bus project.

Another person is Bishop Gene Robinson, the Episcopal bishop mentioned in the above news story. Bishop Robinson has written an open letter to the pope in response to the Vatican's hysteria. Here's the beginning of the letter ...

I pray for you every day, because your pastoral responsibility is so daunting, and even if you are Pope, you are still only human. I have had the opportunity to be chief pastor and bishop to a faithful flock (albeit so very much smaller than yours), and it is an awesome responsibility. It is also a blessing and an honor to serve, is it not?

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle in the last 24 hours due to reports that a senior Vatican official is offended, on your behalf, by my invitation to the White House on Wednesday to welcome you to America. Sister Simone Campbell, one of the nuns working day in and day out on behalf of the poor, is lumped in with me as a purported offense to you.

Based on your saintly ministry so far as Pope, I have to suspect that this report does not represent your own views (if this has even been brought to your attention), but rather the views of those who would try to “protect” you from the world. It would seem that I hold a higher view of you than some of your handlers who may have forgotten that you have demonstrated quite regularly not only your knowledge of the real world, but also a compassion for it. Not to mention that the good nun and I will be somewhere in the middle of a throng of 10,000+ Americans joining together to welcome you and wish you well.

I suppose the Vatican official’s concern has to do with my having been elected and consecrated a Bishop of The Episcopal Church, while at the same time being an openly gay, partnered man. Were I ever to have the honor of meeting you, I would of course not be the first gay man or gay bishop with whom you have had contact. Some of them, undoubtedly, work with and for you in the Vatican. Based on your demonstrated and notorious compassion, I suspect you will not be offended by a gay bishop and a feisty nun somewhere in the crowd of 10,000 admirers.

We disagree in our understandings about sexuality and the diverse and wonderful ways God has made us. But as far as I am concerned, that does not keep me from admiring you and praying for you and your ministry ....

Friday, September 18, 2015

Bishop Francis Quinn on women's ordination

Catholic Bishop Francis Quinn (retired) has a piece in The New York Times - How the Pope Might Renew the Church - in which he endorses women's ordination, as well as optional celibacy for priests and communion for the divorced and remarried. The last priest* (that I'm aware of) who spoke up for women being priests was excommunicated, dumped from his religious order, and laicized, which explains why most priests with these opinions don't voice them until after retirement, if at all. Here's just a bit of what Quinn wrote ...

[...] Recent popes have said publicly that priesthood for women cannot be considered because the gospel and other documents state that Christ ordained men only.

Might the teaching church one day, taking account of changing circumstances, be inspired by the Holy Spirit to study and reinterpret this biblical tradition?

[...]

Pope Francis prefers the simple title “bishop of Rome.” So I ask my brother bishop: Should we not convene a third Vatican Council just as ethical and paradigm-shifting as Vatican Council II of the 1960s?

A Vatican Council III would bring together the world’s bishops under the unifying guidance of Peter. It would include representative major theologians, scholars of sacred Scripture, scientists and appropriate academics, lay people of all ages, clergy members and parishioners, and officials of other faiths.

In addition to the three issues dividing the church, this council and future councils would explore the morality of world economies, spiritual life, human sexuality, peace and war, and the poor and suffering.

Such a council might slow or reverse the flow of the faithful out of the church. It would also stimulate a new conversation about God, one that shows young people that God is not an old man with a long white beard. God is infinite and unlimited ......

[...] “I can’t see any reason why women shouldn’t be priests,” he [Quinn] said. “The church would benefit greatly.” Bishop Quinn said he had “personal ideas” about the ordination of women for decades, but in the past he “would never preach about it or say it publicly,” since Pope John Paul II had taken it “off the table.” .... “I don’t think I’m saying anything drastic in the [New York Times] op-ed, but I’ll hear from people,” he said.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Last night's GOP debate

I watched the Republican debate last night online. Holy mackerel :( The discussion of one issue that especially struck me was that of defunding Planned Parenthood and those deceptive videos about fetal tissue - all the Republican candidates who spoke about the subject in the debate misrepresented the truth. As this Washington Post editorial states, facts and reason were left in the dust, and I found especially creepy Carly Fiorina's lies (Fiorina defends citing nonexistent abortion video).

[...] Mr. Cruz, Mr. Christie and Ms. Fiorina all alluded to a series of heavily edited videos produced by antiabortion activists that have become a flash point in efforts by congressional Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood. Mr. Cruz labeled the family planning provider an “ongoing criminal enterprise” and said the videos show Planned Parenthood officials “bartering and selling the body parts of human beings . . . essentially [confessing] to multiple felonies.” Mr. Christie referred to the “systematic murder of children in the womb to preserve their body parts.” Ms. Fiorina challenged President Obama and Hillary Clinton to view the tapes and “watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

Those characterizations are false. The videos, highly suspect because of how they were produced, contain callous, even insensitive, discussion of medical procedures and aborted fetal tissue, but there is no instance of any Planned Parenthood official discussing the sale of fetal tissue for profit. The images described by Ms. Fiorina, as has been pointed out by media fact checkers, don’t exist.

What is true is that two out of 59 Planned Parenthood affiliates (down from seven) are involved in legal fetal tissue research, offering a connection between scientists and women who want to donate tissue. The only money these affiliates receive is reimbursement for their costs. No federal money, with few exceptions, is used for abortions in any of the affiliates; most of the federal funding to Planned Parenthood helps women, many of them low-income, receive vital services such as family planning and cancer and sexually transmitted disease screenings. Also true is that most Americans don’t want Planned Parenthood defunded and most certainly don’t want the government closed over the issue.

It’s unclear who won Wednesday’s debate, but the clear losers of this segment of conversation were reason and facts.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Total Recall

a 2012 American science fiction action film directed by Len Wiseman. The screenplay by Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback was based on the 1990 film of the same name, which was inspired by the 1966 short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick. The film stars Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, John Cho, and Bill Nighy. It centers upon an ordinary factory worker who accidentally discovers that his current life is a fabrication predicated upon false memories implanted into his brain by the government. Ensuing events leave no room for doubt that his true identity is that of a highly trained secret agent.

I remember the first version of the movie with Arnold. I didn't care much for the cheesy special effects, for which I blame Verhoeven (strange factoid about him ... not only did he make the horrible Showgirls, he was a member of the Jesus Seminar ;) But anyway, the FX are much nicer in this later version and Farrell does a good job in his role. The setting is interesting too ... chemical warfare has left a future Earth with only two habitable continents - the United Federation of Britain (Western Europe) and the Colony (Australia). Those living in the Colony are considered lower forms of life, low paid wage slaves who travel back and forth between the UFB and Australia via an elevator that passes straight through the Earth's core :)

Roger Ebert gave the movie 3 stars out of 4 in his review. Here's the beginning of it ...

The two biggest differences between this new "Total Recall" and the 1990 original are that no scenes are set on Mars, and it stars Colin Farrell instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mars we can do without, I suppose, although I loved the special effects creating the human outpost there. This movie has its own reason you can't go outside and breathe the air.

But Schwarzenegger, now, is another matter. He's replaced as the hero Quaid by Colin Farrell, who in point of fact is probably the better actor. But Schwarzenegger is more of a movie presence and better suited for the role of a wounded bull stumbling around in the china shop of his memories. The story involves a man who is involved without his knowledge (or recollection) in a conflict between a totalitarian regime and a resistance movement. Both films open with him happy and cluelessly married (to Sharon Stone in the first, Kate Beckinsale in this one). In both, he is discontented with his life. In both, he discovers that everything he thinks he knows about himself is fictitious, and all of his memories have been implanted.

The enormity of this discovery is better reflected by Schwarzenegger, who seems more wounded, more baffled, more betrayed — and therefore more desperate. In the Farrell performance, there's more of a sense that the character is being swept along with the events ....

Monday, September 14, 2015

Stephen Colbert: women priests

Stephen Colbert on Salt and Light recalls, towards the end of the interview, that one of the times that the eucharrist was the most real to him was when a woman presided. He says "When I heard a woman say 'this is my body' ... the freshness of hearing a woman say that gave the message a universality that it always should have" but then he goes on to mitigate this by saying that a woman isn't a priest to him. Depressing how acceptable sexism is in the Catholic church.

Saturday, September 05, 2015

Kittens Hansel and Gretel

I've named the two kittens I keep trying to catch for the vet Hansel and Gretel. They're still pretty scared of me, unfortunately .... being chased around the yard with a big net will tend to do that, I guess ;)

My mom's old locket

Today my sister and I looked through my mom's dresser drawers. One interesting thing we found was a locket that I think once belonged to my great aunt Ruth. At first I thought the photos inside were of me and my sister, but then I realized they must be of Ruth and her sister Bessie :)

“An amazing novel [that] proves Cline has the ability to blend popular culture with exciting stories that appeal to everyone.”
—Associated Press

“Mixes Star Wars, The Last Starfighter, Independence Day and a really gnarly round of Space Invaders into a tasty sci-fi stew.”
—USA Today

“A great romp…Cline (ever the fanboy) is both reverent of and referential to the books and movies and games of his childhood.”
—Mother Jones

"Hugely entertaining…a paean to the videogames of a bygone era, and like Ready Player One it is a tremendous amount of fun for anyone who remembers that time and played those games."
–George R.R. Martin, New York Times bestselling author of Game of Thrones

"A novel so fun, you'll want to reboot it and read it again…the best novel this gamer geek has read in a long, long time."
—Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool

"Those conspiracies you imagined when you were fourteen turn out to be true in this masterful tale of Earth's desperate struggle against a powerful alien foe."
—Andy Weir, New York Times bestselling author of The Martian

“With another winning teen protagonist in Zach, Cline mines the nostalgia and geek spheres just as successfully as he did in his acclaimed debut, Ready Player One. The works that obviously influenced the story line, such as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and the films The Last Starfighter and Star Wars, feel like homages rather than borrowings- a rap artist sampling the best beats our there to create an irresistible jam.”—Library Journal, starred review

It's barely 7AM in California (this is why East Coast religion writers have the edge) and already a few people have asked me what this story means. Still working on drinking my coffee but a few thoughts.

One, a lot of priests were already in the business of forgiving women who confessed to having had abortions. This is just a fact. They understand that mercy is not about shuffling someone off to a bishop. Two, in his most recent book, Garry Wills talks about how the sacrament of confession changed after Vatican II. Many people came to understand that forgiveness is both internal (the individual forgives themselves for what they perceive to be sinful... and not every Catholic sees abortion as a sin). They also came to see reconciliation as a communal experience: the body of the Church forgives one another during the Mass ("I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters"), not an individual priest. This is one reason why fewer and fewer Catholics go to confession. And the majority of women who've had abortions and are still alive did so after Roe, which means those women are post Vatican II Catholics with a different understanding of confession and reconciliation.

Finally, and this is important: already there is talk that this will bring women back to the church. I highly doubt that. A one-year period of mercy for women who go through a difficult and incredibly personal decision that they have likely considered in their own consciences at great length are not going to come running back to confession en masse. That's not how these things work. Note that the pope also reached out to ultra-conservative schismatic members of the SSPX at the same time, a group that has little to no overlap with most Catholic women.

Nonetheless, I welcome the change in tone and the idea of mercy is always a good one.

Let me add as a postscript: this is not a diss of people who go to confession or people who perform the sacrament. I've had some truly great experiences of confession (thank you, Jesuits and Paulist Fathers) and some truly rotten ones (no comment on who this was). For a lot of people confession is an important part of their faith life and total respect to that. I bet the Pope is awesome at taking confessions. But a lot of people prefer to grapple with sin and forgiveness on their own or in their chosen communities. So to each their own.